Decentering our analytical position: The dialogicity of things

Abstract

Analyses of embodied interaction still appear to explicitly or implicitly defend a human-centered approach to language and body in the material world. In this article, we propose to decenter our analytical position by acknowledging what artifacts, tools and architectural elements contribute to human activities and practices. Starting from a ‘ventriloqual’ perspective on communication, we demonstrate that the accountable character of people’s activities presupposes a form of material agency that tends to be neglected in our analyses. Far from neglecting human beings’ contributions to their own activities, we show that this approach allows us to acknowledge their capacity to skillfully react and respond to what things indicate, say, or tell them to do. It is, we contend, in this back-and-forth process of actions and reactions that a certain dialogicity of things can be recognized. Decentering the analytical position by focusing on how things traceably contribute to shaping human interactions has, we contend, dramatic theoretical and methodological consequences. In the discussion we argue that resistance in taking a ventriloqual perspective to analyze the social life of things partially depends on its impact on the sensitive notion of responsibility.

Beyond Entanglement: (Socio-) Materiality and Organization Studies

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The agency of things: how spaces and artefacts organize the moral order of an intensive care unit

“…Most of the things that inhabit our social world and shape our conduct in it are created, installed, interpreted and used by humans: behind any architecture there is an architect and behind any object there is not only a design but moreover a designer provided with ideas, theories, expert knowledge, methods and creativity. Theoretical perspectives centred on the role of things do not deny at all the human roots of materiality nor the interpretative role humans play when acting according to those "things that make us do something" (Caron and Caronia 2007;Caronia and Cooren 2014;Cooren 2010;Cooren and Bencherki 2010). What these perspectives underlie is that laypersons acting and interacting in a socio-material context do not cope with humans that conceived the artefacts, nor with the Discourses (with capital D; Gee 2010) that a critical discourse analytical approach can infer from artefacts or architectures.…”

Francophone Perspectives of Learning Through Work

“…A form of teaching/learning can thus take place "on-the-go" by letting/making the situation speak for itself. Certainly, it is Fred and Luc who also make it speak, but making something -whatever it is -speak still means that this thing does say something, creating an effect of decentering in the activity of teaching/learning (Caronia and Cooren 2013).…”